How will the five-month waiting period for SSDI affect my benefits?

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits are subject to a five-month waiting period. This means that Social Security will not pay you for the first five months you are disabled, but will start paying benefits for the sixth full month after you are disabled. (There is no five-month waiting period for SSI benefits.)

This waiting period does not mean that you should wait to apply for benefits. You should start the application process as soon as you become disabled. Many people find that their initial application and request for reconsideration are denied, which means that you may be waiting a year or more before you get a hearing before an administrative law judge.

For many people, the five-month waiting period becomes important in calculating your back payments or retroactive payments once you are approved. Social Security will determine your established onset date (EOD), which is the date your disability began, and may be different from your alleged onset date (AOD), or the date you initially claimed your disability began. Social Security will begin your payments in the sixth full month after your EOD, so when you are calculating how many months of back payments and retroactive payments you will get, you will usually need to subtract 5 from the total. However, Social Security will not pay you retroactive benefits for more than one year before you became disabled anyway, so that means that if a judge finds that your onset date is 17 or more months before your application date, then you can receive the full 12 months of retroactive payments. Here are a couple of examples:

Example A:

January 1, 2014: Established onset date (date disability began)

March 1, 2014: Application date

July 1, 2015: Benefits awarded

Before applying the five-month waiting period, this person would be eligible for 16 months of back payments (for months between the application date and the award date), plus 2 months of retroactive payments (for months between the established onset date and the application date), for a total of 18 months. However, 18 -5 = 13, so this person would only receive 13 months of back payments.

Example B:

October 1, 2012: Established onset date (date disability began)

March 1, 2014: Application date

July 1, 2015: Benefits awarded

Before applying the five-month waiting period, this person would be eligible for 16 months of back payments (for months between the application date and the award date), plus 12 months of retroactive payments (the maximum amount of retroactive payments possible, even though there were 17 months between the established onset date and the application date), for a total of 28 months. The five-month waiting period is applied by subtracting 5 months from the 17 months between the established onset date and the application date. 17 – 5 =12, so the person would still receive 16 months of back payments and 12 months of retroactive payments, for a total of 28 months.

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) has different rules. First, there is no five-month waiting period for SSI. But SSI also does not have retroactive payments. This means that if you are approved for SSI benefits, your back payments can go back to the date of your application, but not before.

6 Comments on How will the five-month waiting period for SSDI affect my benefits?

in march 2016 my heart condition made it impossible. to continue work I was 62 in January. so applied and got ssi. I simultaneously. applied. for ssdi. yesterday they approved my ssdi. does ssi stop and i get just ssdi. or do both continue

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits are available to disabled people with low income and resources. A person receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits would only receive SSI if their SSDI benefits were low enough that they still needed SSI to bring them up to the $733 per month maximum SSI benefit. If a person receives an SSDI benefit higher than that amount, then they are no longer eligible for SSI.

My AOD was Aug 14, 03. I filed Jan 04. The judge just randomly choose May 05 as my EOD. and my benefits SSDI & SSI were approved in 06. I was wondering if you could tell me what formula you would use to figure out how many months back pay & or retroactive benefits I should have received please?

If you were eligible for both SSDI and SSI (because, I assume, your SSDI amount was lower than the SSI maximum ($735 in 2017), and your established onset date (EOD) was after your application date, then the end result would be that your back pay would be the SSI amount times the number of months from your EOD of May 2005 until you got paid. Assuming your SSDI amount was less than the SSI maximum, your monthly benefit going forward would be whatever your SSDI amount is, plus as much of an SSI benefit as is needed to bring your total benefit up to the SSI maximum. The five-month waiting period would apply in your case, so you would not have gotten any SSDI for the first five months you were disabled, but for those months you should have gotten the full SSI amount, so it would not make a difference in the amount. (This assumes there were not other factors such as other income that caused your SSI amount to be reduced.)

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The information on this website does not constitute legal advice. Use of this website, including the contact form or comments form, does not establish an attorney-client relationship. In Florida and Colorado, Brendan Conley practices Social Security disability law exclusively. Attorney charges no fee unless your case is successful; clients may be responsible for their own costs, such as medical costs. Copyright Brendan Conley 2013-2019. Florida: 7320 E. Fletcher Ave. Tampa, FL 33637. Phone: 813-444-2889. Fax: 813-347-9862. Colorado: 1515 Wynkoop St. Ste. 360, Denver, CO 80202. Phone: 720-213-5334. Fax: 720-228-2495.